Tip Tap Sparring?!

is this a waist of time? or is it actually good and should be drilled allot.
Hard sparring results in injuries, so we are limiting it to once a week. I am looking for the best way in the meantime to train in a realistic fashion, and also get the new guys used to fighting without demoralizing them. Any ideas ?

We do this all the time in addition to our regular sparring. It's often part of our warm-up, after shadow boxing but before we start doing pad/bag work & sparring. The whole class does it at the same time for several rounds, rotating to a new opponent each round.

We do this all the time too. Unfortunately we get guys who come from a non tip tap gym and they misinterpret that as our guys can't hit hard. This allows you to explore possible movements and find holes in your game without getting concussed for it.

I learned a lot doing light sparring in Kosho Shorie Ryu Kempo. Their training in slow light sparring that emphasized flow, counters, evasive moves, and unbalancing opponents was proven successful when my sparring skills in the kick-boxing type karate dojo were notably improved. They rarely went hard and that was very different for me.

Dogmatism about what training works is usually offbased - while pro fighters are doing all they can to train effectively and learn skills as fast as possible and obviously BJJ + MT (or Judo + boxing etc) are time effective, long term training gives oportunities in all sorts of areas, and some of them like light tipppy tappy sparring can be effective learning techniques and have very low chances of injuries. And as someone here stated years ago, don't assume that bbs in a point sparring dojo will be wimps, a lot of people can go hard, they just like point sparring.

Hey wait a minute, Omega has 2,679 points and I have over 50,000? Are these some kind of negative rating?

Last edited by patfromlogan; 8/17/2011 10:01am at .

"Preparing mentally, the most important thing is, if you aren't doing it for the love of it, then don't do it." - Benny Urquidez

I did this every morning for a few rounds with a good training partner for about a year, and it took my boxing/kickboxing from complete crap to pretty decent in a very short amount of time. When I keep it in regular practice, my striking is super crisp and fluid.

I learned a lot doing light sparring in Kosho Shorie Ryu Kempo. Their training in slow light sparring that emphasized flow, counters, evasive moves, and unbalancing opponents was proven successful when my sparring skills in the kick-boxing type karate dojo were notably improved. They rarely went hard and that was very different for me.

Dogmatism about what training works is usually offbased - while pro fighters are doing all they can to train effectively and learn skills as fast as possible and obviously BJJ + MT (or Judo + boxing etc) are time effective, long term training gives oportunities in all sorts of areas, and some of them like light tipppy tappy sparring can be effective learning techniques and have very low chances of injuries. And as someone here stated years ago, don't assume that bbs in a point sparring dojo will be wimps, a lot of people can go hard, they just like point sparring.

Hey wait a minute, Omega has 2,679 points and I have over 50,000? Are these some kind of negative rating?

Some people confuse this with training for 'point contact' competitions, though I find the dynamic totally different. My karate dojo we did no-glove sparring with light to medium contact for these reasons; learning how to exploit each other's mistakes, and getting used to taking contact. I also have friends that do shotokan/TKD who compete and focus on competition in point-contact tournaments. They unapologetically attempt to exploit the rules and win their competitions..when training for 'competition sparring' they have a totally different mindset than 'dojo sparring.'